“ Art consists in drawing the line somewhere” – G.K. Chesterton A N D S O T O B E D < the documentary > In 1998 I had made an hour long film about the relationship between people and their beds. It is not a film which runs in a straight line thematically, but plays out in more of a circle with no definitive beginning or ending. Really a series of short stories strung together. A viewer can easily come in at any place during the film and leave it at any point as the film has no narration – the characters in the film telling for themselves their own individual stories about beds, this common place piece of furniture which holds such an important role in our lives; the bed. The bed as a place of creative inspiration is not unknown to writers, composers and artists. British writer Anthony Burgess (Clockwork Orange) wrote a book about Beds as did actor and writer Grouch Marx, who suggests one way to stay awake is by subtracting sheep. Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, Voltaire, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner and John Milton are but a handful who wrote in their beds. Frida Kahlo, Matisse and Fantin-LaTour also found their beds preferable for painting and sculpting. The great Italian composer Rossini did close to all of his composing in bed as did other composers Puccini, Sibelius and Donizetti. Even Albert Einstein admitted to having the equation E = mc2, flash across his eyes for the first time while he lay in his bed. Beds have always had their place, even in politics. While many a deal has been struck or plot schemed from a bed, some like Stalin found that eventually he couldn’t even sleep in his bed for fear he would be murdered in it. Charles XII of Sweden who arrived in Turkey after his defeat in Poltava took to his bed for sixteen months. The French have always embraced the culture of the bed. Louis XIV re-built Versailles to accommodate his collection of 413 beds. He had a habit of giving away beautiful beds as gifts. He is famous for presiding over the government while laying on a grand bed in the centre of French Parliament. In recent history, John Lennon also understood what a great platform the bed is for getting political. He and his wife Yoko Ono staged their protest for world peace with the ‘Bed – In’, at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel in 1969. Many artists, writers and composers were confirmed lovers of the bed. All bed workers at one time: … Van Gogh, Fantin LaTour, Rousseau, Mattisse Writers: Proust, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mark Twain, John Milton, Groucho Marx, Voltaire, Sir Walter Raleigh, Samuel Johnson, William Shakespeare, James Thompson, Longfellow, Sir Francis Bacon Composers who took to their beds: Sibelius, Rossini, Puccini, and Schubert >> and we could hear samplings of their music. “ It is hard for the unimaginative to conceive that a person may lie in bed, without pencil or paper and indeed with eyes closed, and be creating important art or science”. Anthony Burgess Synopsis: ‘And So To Bed’ is a film which explores the value of the bed in contemporary North American Society. This fifty-nine minute documentary recreates the physical, mental, cultural and social experience of being in bed. Beds are literally where we are, one-third of our lives, places in which we imagine who we are, how we should live our lives and how our lives should be fulfilled. Beds are thus simultaneously a symbol of home, domesticity, and marriage – real places that make space for contentment, fear, love and violence. The film reveals beds not just as places of sleep where we take life lying down, but as spaces of recuperation and contemplation, of dreaming and eroticism. “ We are most ourselves in a bed”, says Dr. Peter Markenstyn, who in his work as a coroner understands it as the place where we are most vulnerable – both emotionally and physically. This bed-space is explored through interviews with ‘bedlidites’ - lovers of beds, enmeshed in an eclectic array of bed lore. Director Jeff McKay structured the film around nineteen interview segments, each one providing a different personal viewpoint about the bed. The film has no narration and has intentionally been given a meditative pacing. McKay hopes that after viewing the film one may have more appreciation of the value of the bed in our lives. It’s where we make many of our major life decisions and provided for us an oasis from the hurried and harried world around us. “People who think of beds only in terms of sexual exercise or sleep simply do not understand that a bed is the best of all places for a philosophical discussion, an argument, and if necessary a showdown. It was not by chance that so many kings of old administered justice from their beds, and even today there is something splendidly parliamentary about an assembly of concerned persons in a bed”. – Robertson Davies Bed Quotations : “You spend one third of your life in bed, two thirds if you’re an actor”. Groucho Marx : “ It is hard for the unimaginative to conceive that a person may lie in bed, without pencil or paper and indeed with eyes closed, and be creating important art or science. One art in particular, a very modern one, can only be practiced in its initial phaseby the artist’s sending himself to bed and closing his eye’s. This is the art of film or television scenario. The scenarist must lie down in the dark and watch the film unroll in the projection room of his skull. Analogously, a symphony must be composed in the brain and heard there, down to the last drum thump and tuba blast, before it can be committed to scoring paper. This is the way Sibelius worked, Einstein lay down one day and saw E equals MC squared flash in a fire on the interior of his eyelids.” - Anthony Burgess “I went out to bathe in Martins saltwater hotbath in Southhampton and, floating on my back I fell asleep nearly an hour by the watch, without sinking or turning – a thing I never did before and should hardly have though possible. Water is he easiest bed hat can be”. - Benjamin Franklin “Twin beds are only good for hospitals and insane asylums. Fifty % of these inhabitants would not be there if they had not used twin beds at home in the first place.” - Goucho Marx “There is nothing sweeter than climbing into bed and plotting the destruction of your enemies”. - Joseph Stalin “I have made my bed in the darkness” Job XVII:13 “Beds: per night – 15 cents Safe Beds : per night – 25 Cents” - Sign from an American frontier hotel